Science: Academicians

On photographic plates no
bigger than a stick of chewing gum, astronomers can look at a spectrum
so tiny that it must be viewed through a jeweler's eyepiece and tell
what kind of atoms are dancing in a star trillions of miles away. Thus
has astronomy advanced since Galileo first glimpsed the four big
satellites of Jupiter and wondered what they were. The mod ern art of
splitting up light into its com ponent colors, which disclose the
chemical nature of the source, depends on a little thing called the
diffraction grating....